Rob Schneider Explains Why He Hasn’t Worked

Former SNL cast member Rob Schneider probably doesn’t even qualify as a has-been. More like a barely-was. He had bit parts in a few mediocre movies and lead roles in a couple of historically awful ones (Deuce Bigalow, anyone?). But that’s only because the Democrats in California tax so much.

“The state of California is a mess,” Schneider declared, “and the supermajority of Democrats is not working. I’ve been a lifelong Democrat and I have to switch over because it no longer serves the people of this great state. We need to have a new voice. We need to have a new direction, and we need to break the supermajority. It isn’t helping with jobs.”

“The last time I made a movie in California was seven years ago,” he said. “And that’s because we’re not being competitive. I own a vitamin company with my friend and we moved out of state because of overregulation. It isn’t helping businesses.”

In related news, Victoria Jackson hasn’t been in a movie because of gay people. It’s not because they are talentless mediocrities that couldn’t sell tickets to a raffle.

Wow. I thought that was Andrew Dice Clay. I guess that shows how relevant either of them are- I can’t tell them apart.

Sastra

I own a vitamin company with my friend and we moved out of state because of overregulation.

Why do I suspect the ‘overregulation’ involved prohibitions regarding making blatantly false claims? Even DSHEA has some standards, low as they are.

http://www.facebook.com/rick.desper rickdesper

Simpler explanation for the downturn of his career: Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo.

kyoseki

We saw him a few months ago with his trophy wife at a local restaurant.

Definitely looked like she wears the (skintight leather) pants in that relationship.

http://artk.typepad.com ArtK

His point that the movie industry in California is hurting has some basis. The source of that problem is far more complex than simply taxes. I should note that, despite these issues, California has been gaining jobs pretty steadily.

I own a vitamin company with my friend and we moved out of state because of overregulation.

Translation: CalOSHA and the Board of Pharmacy said that my employees had to wash their hands before making vitamins. Waaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh!

I love his “conversion story.” “I used to be a Democrat…” How many other born-again conservatives have that kind of conversion story? 50%? 100%? The yokels eat that up like candy, just like they love the religious conversion stories. Of course, it would be better if he did this on his death-bed.

screechymonkey

I’m all for a good joke about Schneider’s career (though South Park pretty much said all there is to say about it), but I think you (and the Raw Story article you linked to) are misstating Schneider’s point. He’s not saying that he isn’t getting movie roles, as if somehow the entire industry is making fewer films. A quick check of his imdb page shows that he has been in movies recently. He’s saying that he hasn’t made a movie in California in seven years. Which may well be true — I didn’t check where each of his movies was filmed.

Which is not to say that he has a good argument. California’s taxes are only to blame for movies being shot elsewhere in the sense that California hasn’t followed other states in this race-to-the-bottom practice of providing special tax credits or subsidies for the film industry. And even if you think California is wrong not to do so, because the film industry somehow deserves special treatment, it’s not something that is generalizable to other industries as Schneider is trying to claim.

Alverant

Yeah, the story goes “I used to be a Democrat then something became inconvenient/I couldn’t be a jerk anymore so now I’m a Republican where I’m free to lie and offend and claim persecution when people object.”

http://polrant@blogspot.com democommie

The Schneiderater was on a Syracuse drive-time show a few weeks back. He said, then, that he wasn’t getting into movies because Adam Sandler always gave him shitty parts.

Two Robster, Bill Murray.

Doug Little

I own a vitamin company with my friend and we moved out of state because of overregulation

WTF kind of product are they selling, the regulation on the vitamin industry is non existent. Note to self, don’t buy any of Rob Schneider’s Vitamin’s.

http://www.facebook.com/set.v.kouwenhoven Set Kouwenhoven

That was a little harsh, Ed…

http://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/User:Modusoperandi Modusoperandi

He’s right. This tax-raising Democrat Supermajority needs to end because Rob Sneider hasn’t made a movie in California six full years before they got it.

kyoseki

screechymonkey

Which is not to say that he has a good argument. California’s taxes are only to blame for movies being shot elsewhere in the sense that California hasn’t followed other states in this race-to-the-bottom practice of providing special tax credits or subsidies for the film industry.

.. is the right answer.

I work in the visual effects industry in Los Angeles and we’ve been completely fucked by (among other things) Canadian subsidies, so much so that the only two major independent VFX houses in LA (Digital Domain and Rhythm & Hues) have both declared bankruptcy and the third, corporate owned one (Sony Pictures Imageworks) is busy forcing people to move to Vancouver or Montreal in order to get kickbacks for the movie studios.

The kickbacks are so integral to the process that the studios won’t even entertain the idea of California companies doing the work even if it’s cheaper – the studio can take a loan out against the subsidy and get the money up front – so they are literally dictating that the work be done in Canada, a country not known for it’s low tax rates.

At least Sandler was giving him parts. I thought that showed loyalty on his part.

A lot of SNL guys try to make films. The ones that make films that sell a lot of tickets (Sandler in the past, Farrell these days) get to keep doing so. The ones that cannot do so need to find other work. Sometimes how this shakes out is unexpected. From their SNL work, nobody thought Mike Myers would be a bigger movie star than Dana Carvey. But even though he has probably more natural talent, Carvey was an idiot when it came to picking scripts.

Sadly, Myers has followed him down that path.

24fps

Hi, Canadian media producer over here. Yes, we have tax credits, but I wouldn’t characterize them as a “race to the bottom” or as a “kickback to the studios”.

Studios can’t apply for tax credits up here – only Canadian coproducers can. A large portion of the credit is allocated to the budget, which can be borrowed on (and interest paid on, so it’s not like it’s “free money”). In exchange, we generate employment and spin-off economics that more than pay for the investment. I should also point out that there are many territories in the US (Louisiana is one that springs to mind) who do the same thing. It’s an incentive to spread the work around, rather than have it concentrated in one place. The same argument applies to regions in Canada vs Toronto and Vancouver. Personally, I don’t do service work (I make independent docs and factual programming), but I do use regional and federal tax credits to finance projects.

There are still films and television shows being made in California, just not ALL of them. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.

* when you suck so much that you’re getting offered only bit-parts in Adam Sandler, movies, that’s really saying something!

kyoseki

24fps

Hi, Canadian media producer over here. Yes, we have tax credits, but I wouldn’t characterize them as a “race to the bottom” or as a “kickback to the studios”.

If it were a level playing field, like it was a few years ago, you’d have a small post production industry in BC supporting tv & film work that was shot in BC (things like the X-Files and the Stargate series), the bulk of the work was done where it was shot.

Then the subsidies showed up and the US based studios effectively demanded that taxpayers subsidize their movies – BC taxpayers are, in effect, mailing a $250 check to the LA studios every year and the only people they’re employing are are the same guys who were doing the work in Los Angeles or London a year ago (seriously, I know most of them), it’s an artificially created market and as soon as the subsidies end or even decrease, the work will go elsewhere.

When the movie studios themselves say “you will do this work in Canada or you won’t get the job” even if your bid is LESS than the competing studio even with the subsidy, how can you claim that it’s anything other than the studios acting in their own interests because they want a giant lump sum for promising to do the work up there?

There is an argument to be made for limited subsidies, but this is a wholesale abuse of the system.

Regional credits that require you to shoot there using local crews is one thing, you can claim that it boosts tourism and there is a certain validity to that (The Lord of the Rings series did wonders for New Zealand’s tourism industry, for example), but the vast majority of it isn’t even shit that will boost tourism because it doesn’t require that work be filmed there, they’re just paying for the guys who work in windowless offices doing cg explosions – only $80m of the $430m BC allocated to the production tax credit was actually spent on movies/tv shows that were shot in BC, the rest was just money sent directly to the movie studios for promising to do the visual effects work there.

Vancouver is already learning what happens when another location (in this case Montreal) offers higher subsidies, the work simply moves there, because post production is not something that requires a huge in-place infrastructure (like sound stages or film crews), which is why they’re desperately trying to broker a truce between the provinces to prevent the “race to the bottom” you say isn’t happening.

… and yes, I’m well aware that US states offer incentives as well, but a large number of them require that the actual shooting be done there, which the Canadian ones don’t, there are also other factors that make subsidies by US states less attractive.

California is currently trying to drum up it’s own subsidy program to compete and as soon as it’s 1% cheaper to do the work here because California taxpayers are subsidizing the cost, the studios will demand that the post facilities abandon Vancouver & Montreal and do the work here again.

The losers are the taxpayers and the artists who are forced to keep switching countries to chase their own jobs, but the studios are laughing all the way to the bank.

cry4turtles

After readîng those posts, I’m just going to make my own movies. Anyone want to subsidize?

http://www.pandasthumb.org Area Man

The kickbacks are so integral to the process that the studios won’t even entertain the idea of California companies doing the work even if it’s cheaper…

Isn’t this the kind of thing that trade agreements are supposed to prevent? I’m not saying that there’s any violation of current trade treaty occurring here, but it’s clearly against the whole idea of having a level playing field. If it’s the Chinese doing it with solar panels or Brazil with cotton, it’s a WTO affair. But I guess the orbit of the film industry is different.

coryat

The South Park has been mentioned above, I can’t believe that no one has linked yet:

Isn’t this the kind of thing that trade agreements are supposed to prevent? I’m not saying that there’s any violation of current trade treaty occurring here, but it’s clearly against the whole idea of having a level playing field. If it’s the Chinese doing it with solar panels or Brazil with cotton, it’s a WTO affair. But I guess the orbit of the film industry is different.

It’s trickier than conventional WTO issues because visual effects are a service industry.

We get the plates, we do some work on them, then we pass the plates back. It’s all done digitally so there’s no physical product to track, which is a big part of why this hasn’t really fallen afoul of WTO agreements yet.

A few people in LA are looking into the possibility of enacting countervailing duties to offset the benefit of the foreign subsidies, which might be an option, but it really ends up costing everyone money.

These subsidies were originally conceived to promote domestic film production, to pay for the sort of thing that 24fps up there does – independent documentaries – but they’re being used to pay for gigantic tentpoles that rely heavily on visual FX work.

Nobody has a problem with subsidies to pay for independent local projects, but that’s not what they’re being used for.

Canadian taxpayers are, in effect, dumping tens of millions into movies like After Earth, The Lone Ranger and RIPD, they’re shouldering the financial risk of these films and whether they make money or not (and those turkeys sure as hell didn’t), they don’t see a single dime of it. The studios love it because they’re getting the cost of a risky picture offset, if they could, they’d get foreign taxpayers to pay for the entire movie without sharing any of the profits.

It’s worth noting that these subsidies (combining provincial & national) can amount to 55% of the cost of an artist’s billing rate, NOT the artist’s salary which is what tax is paid on (Montreal, I believe, is approaching 60%), I know that what the studio pays my employer for a day of work sure as hell isn’t even close to what I get PAID for a day of work.

So the argument that there are ancillaries that cover the cost really is laughable – no independent study in the US has ever managed to show that it generates revenue, quite the reverse (on the order of a dollar return for every ten dollars spent in many cases), so I fail to see how Canada is likely to be any better given that they pay out even more.

… but politicians get to hang out with celebrities and pretend that paying for a bunch of nerds in warehouses somehow boosts the local economy.

http://www.shannonhubbell.com brundlefly

Schneider is just pissed that they didn’t have him back for the new Judge Dredd movie.

Artor

Wow. I thought that was Andrew Dice Clay. I guess that shows how relevant either of them are- I can’t tell them apart.

Let’s not be too cruel here. Andrew Dice Clay was recently in a Woody Allen film and as I understand is quote good in it.

http://www.shannonhubbell.com brundlefly

Quote? Quote good? Ugh.

http://www.facebook.com/den.wilson d.c.wilson

Carvey was an idiot when it came to picking scripts.

To be fair, Carvey wasn’t able to work for years because he was recovering from botched heart surgery. Not that it excuses him from making Master of Disguise.

And here I though the reason why Schneider wasn’t starring in any movies lately was because Adam Sandler was tired of carrying his pathetically unfunny ass. Happy Madison (Sandler’s production company) can only afford so many turkeys like Deuce Bigolow.

http://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/User:Modusoperandi Modusoperandi

kyoseki“…so I fail to see how Canada is likely to be any better given that they pay out even more.”

Simple: Canadians pay in metric, but get back in standard. They pay a liter, but if just ten percent of that comes back in taxes, they get a whole three and a half ounces back. It’s a pretty good con, actually.

d.c.wilson“And here I though the reason why Schneider wasn’t starring in any movies lately was because Adam Sandler was tired of carrying his pathetically unfunny ass. Happy Madison (Sandler’s production company) can only afford so many turkeys like Deuce Bigolow.”

But they’re all turkeys. The only variable seems to be how many drunk college bros aren’t yet in the drunk tank on opening night.

lordshipmayhem

The minute I hit the “anti-vaxx” part of his Wikipedia entry, it told me all I needed to know about his sanity.

exdrone

Here is The Joke of the Week from his Official Website:

Cop: “Did you kill this man?”

Me: “No, a bullet killed him. Bullets are made of lead, which comes from the ground. The ground is part of nature. He died of natural causes. Case closed.”

.

So I’ll bet all of you who weren’t calling Schneider a comedy genius are feeling pretty silly now.

kyoseki

Apparently, the MPAA have just figured out that California has a budget surplus right now;

I would rather NOBODY had subsidies and just competed on a level playing field, but if California gets even close to matching Canadian subsidies, the studios will pull the work back here so fast it’ll make your head spin.

Maybe then, the claims of building a lasting industry that will survive the loss of subsidies can finally be put to rest – after all, given how fast Hollywood abandoned HOLLYWOOD, why anyone would believe they would show any loyalty to anyone else is beyond me.

I suppose you have to give him credit for finding ways to milk his 15 minutes. We’ll have to see how he makes a martyr of himself in 2021. I’m voting for “I haven’t made a movie in Hollywood in 15 years because the lizard people are oppressing me.”

Just heard Rob Schneider on the radio doing an ad for solar panels (will save you a bundle, etc.) – I’m in California, the radio station is in California, and the solar panels shysters are in California. Is he just dishonest or a complete wretch now? Now that he’s a bragging Republican, best of luck with that Rob…